That said, “psychic shock” seems to be a pretty good description of the challenges facing subjectivity in contemporary times. I’m interested in not just remarking on the fact of this psychic shock, but thinking how we deal with it. What is the way for individuals, attempting to work within the confines and means and of their own subjectivity, to deal with this psychic shock in a useful way? If you asked DARPA about the problem of drone pilots with PTSD, their solution would be either to help the pilots overcome the PTSD, or improve the drones’ algorithm to write the pilots out of the equation. I think it’s fairly clear that “our” (who knows who that is really) solution is not either of these things, but is a bigger question about the intersection of technology with that “deep and ancient understanding of what it means to take a life”.

“This type of simultaneity of local & non-local demands an entirely new way of representation.”

Totally. In a similar vein to my comments on Madeline Ashby’s post about the New Aesthetic and the masculine gaze, I think there are going to be combinations of “old and new” solutions here. Some, like the problem of humans killing humans, or men marginalizing/objectifying women, are problems we are somewhat familiar with. But how to use new technology to combat these old problems, in and among the “entirely new way of representation” that is more and more not a choice but a fact, is a new problem.

I wonder what the “interesting” parts of the New Aesthetic might alert us to, by way of new solutions.

There certainly seems to be a fair amount of psychic shock attending our embed into virtuality. There’s a massive disconnect between the evolutionary pace of the human species, the ability of our collective psyche to effectively understand, integrate, and adapt to the world, and the speed at which we extrude technologies that increasingly modulate our environment, our psyche, and probably even our genes. We’re still pretty much just apes trying to come to terms with what we’ve created and what we’re supposed to do with this crazy world.

So yeah… Drone pilots are getting PTSD because there’s a deep and ancient understanding of what it means to take a life, no matter how much you gloss over it, de-locate it, abstract it…

“Where does that node channel that information it accesses?”

The NSA? Palantir Technologies? Interesting to consider the trails animals create and deepen around water sources. Our digital wanderings leave similar trails – Google PageRank, eg, weighs & catalogs the watering holes, the passages deepen with greater traffic. So, there are moving nodes – individuals – and situated nodes – the watering holes, blogs, Amazon, etc… With mobile and locative tech the virtual networks and movements intersect with the physical. I’m both shopping at Amazon (user acct, credit card, purchase history, etc) and hanging out downtown (cell id, carrier acct, GPS coord, paths). This type of simultaneity of local & non-local demands an entirely new way of representation. The frontal cortex has been optimizing around mapping & prediction within a coherent linear physicality for millenia. Suddenly we superimpose non-locality and the mapping gets all out of whack. There is no longer a 1-1 relationship. Secretly, I occasionally imagine this as the necessary undermining of duality and the core archetypal dialectic that underpins our classical logic structures…

The watcher/watched dialectic is, of course, a false one as you note. It’s a fuzzy web getting ever more blurred. I may be a casual watcher of my friends & affiliates but piggy-backed on my Twittering & Facebooking et al are FBI watch lists, NSA crawlers, and various other shadowy 3rd parties that co-opt and amplify my casual tracking. In that process I am both a watched node and a watching filter, in no fixed state modulating by degrees from one to the other as I go through my day. The line between ubicomp and ubiquitous surveillance is thin indeed and it’s only hope and the hard work of industrious freedom-ites that endeavors to make sure the digital sunlight reaches all parties of the global webwork. Ie the tools that allow the watchers to watch also allow the watched to become better watchers of the watchers!

Deep inside my own faith lies in the ape. Nature is working through us always even though it looks like we drift far from those shores. We’re a young species a little bit lost in our own power to create and wield tools without fully understanding the consequences or the complexity of the webs in which we’re embedded. I hope the lessons of our maturation will be reasonably gentle and not require a big rap upside the head with the stick of Zen…

New Aesthetics might be a significant part of our attempt to resolve subjectivity in contemporary times. After subjectivity has been theoretically crushed and re-incarnated several times over the 20th century, we’re still wondering what role our ego-driven movement-to-subjectivity has in terms of the broader world. Especially since we really like our new cyborgian appendages, our data environments, and our social-network-selves. That drone pilots are still getting PTSD means that we haven’t resolved the 20th century issues of subjectivity, even as our same bodies and brains adapt to new technological environments.

It would be all too easy to rehash old 20th century arguments for political subjectivity, and attempt to analogically apply them to the current technological environments. For one thing, regardless of their inherent logic, 20th century arguments didn’t succeed in liberating political subjectivity from the machine of modernism. (Or is this too broad of a statement to make?) And so, we should not try and promote, say, Proletarian Consciousness among drone pilots, as we already tried that with little success. But whether or not that is true, I would say additionally that we may find new, “New Politics” arguments within New Aesthetics… a contemporary approach to subjectivity that is political.

Just to throw out a possibility, what if the watcher/watched dynamic could be portrayed a different way (which of course it can). What if, rather than a dialectic model, we used a node model. If we consider each watcher/watched relationship as a vector, a flow of information in one direction, where does the information pool? Is there anyone subjectivity that has more access to this information reservoir than anyone else? Where does that node channel that information it accesses? To the library? To the courts? To books? Now, if we visualized this flow map, we’d have quite a New Aesthetic diagram to look at. But we’d also have a political map. Is this diagram possible? Does it already exist somewhere? Perhaps the difference between the rest of the New Aesthetic is, that rather than simply happening upon this diagram, we need to create it. Or, rather than just one designer/researcher thinking this up and needing to go create it, “we” as a whole determine a need for this, and we figure out how “we” are going to do it. Not a “we” as opposed to “them”… but a “we” as opposed to… what? The world? The challenge at hand? The fact of nodes? I’m not sure.

Cybernetics is explicitly about regulation & control of information systems. If we are to become cyborgs (or already are), we’re irrevocably part of a control system andthe power dynamics that attend such. Of course, all of society & nature likewise relies on control mechanisms. Where control becomes political or oppressive is a debate that frequently walks through a fog of subjectivity. In a sense, attempts to regulate misuse are simply another aspect of control though, arguably, a more socially & ecologically positive form.

Regarding the notion of being watched, it’s worth breaking through the Us-Them dichotomy and considering that humans have many fundamental drives to watch each other. We are both the watchers and the watched. There is, of course, a power dynamic worth acknowledging that works through this but my personal sense is that the drive to power is a universal that is ultimately independent of technology. Or rather, broad technologies are wielded towards specific ends by those with the will to power.

“We’re going to have to design-fiction a political module quickly.”

I like this phrasing.

To me, part of the glitch-aesthetic is its overt novelty but I think there’s something more interesting… The glitch reveals an imperfection in the algorithmic landscape. It suggests that machines cannot be perfect enough to totally control or replace us messy humans.